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“Civility” is the Israel lobby’s new weapon against free speech on US campuses

As I was driving through Indiana en route to Michigan this weekend, I saw this billboard for a local sheriff’s election campaign. There, above the uniformed police officer with his military-style crew cut, is the slogan “Return to Civility.”

It seemed the perfect metaphor for what “civility” has come to mean on US campuses: the forceful policing, at the behest of Israel lobby groups, of any discourse or activism critical of Israel.

But civility crackdowns are now breaking out across the country. Another alarming case involves a student at Ohio University.

Pouring cold water on free speech

Last week Ohio University President Roderick J. McDavis challenged the newly elected student senate president Megan Marzec to take the “ice bucket challenge.” This is a stunt where someone pours a bucket of ice water over their head on video to raise awareness of the disease ALS.

It has become a very mainstream activity which allows the participant to appear philanthropic at no political risk (former President George W. Bush took the “challenge,” inadvertently recalling his administration’s use of water-boarding as a form of torture).

She made a video in which she pours a bucket of fake blood over her head to protest Israel’s abuse of Palestinians.

“I’m urging you and OU [Ohio University] to divest and cut all ties with academic and other Israeli institutions and businesses,” Marzec says in the 50-second video that she posted on her Facebook page Wednesday afternoon, The Columbus Dispatch reports.

“This bucket of blood symbolizes the thousands of displaced and murdered Palestinians, atrocities which OU is directly complacent in through cultural and economic support of the Israeli state,” she adds. (The original instance of the video is no longer available but I am including this copy in my post because I believe people should see that it is, contrary to the lurid criticisms, rather tame, polite and indeed civil.)

Marzec was quickly and swiftly denounced. The Twitter account of the Student Senate tweeted: “On behalf of the student senate, we humbly apologize for the video President Megan Marzec posted.”

On behalf of the student senate, we humbly apologize for the video President Megan Marzec posted.

“In part of the video she promotes the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) movement, which is anti-Semitic,” one student critic told The Cleveland Jewish News.

Marzec herself has reported receiving death threats for her protest. She showed The Athens Post newspaper messages she’d been sent that “ridiculed her as a woman, among other insults,” and said that she’s been subjected to “a whole slew of very vile things.”

But she strongly defended her protest. “It’s clear to me that my video was not anti-Semitic,” she told The Post. “Any reframing of the video is caused by outrage that I am standing in solidarity with oppressed Palestinians.”

More than 600 people have signed an online petition in “solidarity with Megan Marzec’s right of free speech to publicly state her political opinions on the liberation of Palestine.” It also condemns “any attempt to employ threats and/or acts of interpersonal violence to intimidate Ohio University students into silence.”

“Civility”

Enter the president of Ohio University, who has come down not on the side of Palestinians victimized by massive Israeli violence, not on the side of Marzec who was trying to draw attention to that violence, and not against those denigrating and threatening her.

“Her actions do not reflect the position of Ohio University or President McDavis,” the university statement says. “We recognize the rights of individual students to speak out on matters of public concern and we will continue to do so, but want to be clear that the message shared today by her is not an institutional position or a belief held by President McDavis.”

And then here is the “civility” punchline (emphasis added):

In a university community of our size, there are many issues that merit our attention and dialogue. As stewards of the public trust, we have a responsibility to encourage the free exchange of ideas. For it is through dialogue on conflicting views that we will move toward mutual understanding.

I take great pride in the fact that Ohio University is a community that tackles hard issues head-on. The conflict in Israel and Gaza is no exception. But the manner in which we conduct ourselves as we exercise our right to free speech is of utmost importance.

In my First Year Student Convocation address, I emphasized the idea that we are a University family. As members of a University family, we will not always agree, but we should respect one another. And when we engage in difficult dialogue on issues such as this, we must do so with civility and a deep appreciation for the diverse and resilient international community in which we live.

Who is being protected?

There is much to be said about McDavis’ invocation of the “family” – with all its connotations of patriarchy, hierarchy, privacy, discipline and infantilization as a metaphor – but I will leave that for another day.

There are important unstated assumptions in McDavis’ statement. Notably, he seems to be saying that by criticizing Israeli violence against Palestinians, and urging the institution to end its complicity, Marzec was somehow targeting and injuring a component of the campus community or “family.”

Unless there is a brigade of the Israeli army with particularly sensitive feelings permanently stationed on campus, this cannot be the case.

Rather, the implication seems to be that criticism of Israel and its actions is deemed offensive to Jewish students. This is certainly implied by the intervention of the Jewish fraternity.

But we must always reject the equation of Jewish students with the State of Israel, no matter how often pro-Israel groups and university administrations insist on it.

This is the Israel lobby’s new tactic, as I have argued in my recent book The Battle for Justice in Palestine: to equate criticism of Israel or solidarity with Palestinians with “hate speech,” “hate crimes” or even attacks on an individual such as sexual or racial violence that must be ultimately subject to university or juridical discipline and punishment.

In the case of Salaita, this meant the loss of his job based on libelous and speculative claims that his statements about Israel would mean students in his classroom might be endangered.

In the same vein, when Palestine solidarity groups have distributed mock eviction notices as a tactic to educate peers on campus about Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes, they have usually faced false allegations from Zionist groups that the dorm rooms of Jewish students were “targeted.”

This is the same basic idea behind the wave of complaints against various universities made by Zionist individuals and organizations under Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act in recent years alleging that campus Palestine solidarity activism was making Jewish students feel “unsafe.”

While the strategy has so far failed at the legal level, it is succeeding with university administrations, who are rushing to issue “civility” statements explicitly or implicitly targeting utterers of speech critical of Israel.

It cannot be mere coincidence that Nicholas Dirks, chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley, sent an email to the entire campus community last week also calling for “civility.”

Ostensibly marking the 50th anniversary of Berkeley’s famed Free Speech Movement, Dirks said, “we can only exercise our right to free speech insofar as we feel safe and respected in doing so, and this in turn requires that people treat each other with civility.”

What does “civility” mean in this context? Does it mean saying “please,” “thank you,” “sir” and “ma’am” to war criminals? Or does it mean electing a sheriff instead of a professor to run a university to make everyone feel “safe” and secure?

Dirks, as I recount in The Battle for Justice in Palestine, was the vice president at Columbia University who, prior to taking his new job at Berkeley, boasted about his role in the witch-hunt against Professor Joseph Massad.

Losing their grip

Zionism is losing its grip. It has lost the substantive debate on the past and future of Palestine in the academy. It no longer has a hold on the hearts and minds of young people the way it did in the years after the 1967 War.

Many of the Jewish students whose “safety” is being invoked to justify the campus crackdowns are joining – and in some cases leading – chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and similar groups.

Key Israel lobby groups, as I explain in the book, see US campuses as the battleground on which the future of US support for Israel will be secured or lost.

Raw power – intimidation, denial of tenure, firings and other kinds of discipline – are being used to try to stop the growth of Palestine solidarity on campus.

Corporatized university administrations across the country are fully complicit in this repression. And this iron fist is being wrapped in the velvet glove of “civility.”

Comments

Almost 25 years ago i was threatened with "disciplinary action" when i brought a Palestinian and a left socialist speaker to my college. The event was approved but when certain other campus groups heard a Palestinian was speaking they pressured the administration to cancel the event. I was pressured to cancel the group, luckily i did not have the authority to cancel the event and the event went on due to a call from the press.

This reminds me of something Noam Chomsky said when commenting on the most recent Gaza Palestine conflict. He said, “100 percent of the casualties and the destruction and the devastation and so on could have been avoided if Israel had lived up to the ceasefire agreement […] from November 2012, instead of violating it [...] and then escalating the violation [...], in order to block the unity government and to persist in […] the policies of taking over what they want in the West Bank […] separating it from Gaza, and keeping Gaza on what they’ve called a "diet," Dov Weissglas’s famous comment. The man who negotiated the so-called withdrawal in 2005 pointed out that the purpose of the withdrawal is to end the discussion of any political settlement and to block any possibility of a Palestinian state, and [..] the Gazans will be kept on a diet, meaning just enough calories allowed so they don’t all die—because that wouldn’t look good for Israel’s fading reputation—but nothing more than that. And with its vaunted technical capacity, [...] Israeli experts calculated precisely how many calories would be needed to keep the Gazans on their diet, under siege, blocked from export, blocked from import. Fishermen can’t go out to fish. The naval vessels drive them back to shore. [...] probably over a third and maybe more, of Gaza’s arable land is barred from entry to Palestinians. It’s called a "barrier." That’s the norm. That’s the diet. They want to keep them on that, meanwhile separated from the West Bank, and continue the ongoing project of […] taking over the parts of the West Bank.”
You're not a self-hating Jew, racist or an anti-Semite by disagreeing with Israeli policy, just a person of morals, compassion and with a conscience.

I must be sentimental as it actually pains me to see UCLA at Berkeley debase itself in this manner. Such a huge (worldwide) reputation, then along comes zionism and poof! Watch it go up in smoke. It looks like the war for US universities has officially started. It was high time.

The school should be sued and boycotted for it's blatant attempt to prohibit free speech. The world has seen Israel for the terrorist state that it is. We have seen the murders, the apartheid, the disrespect for millions of people committed by Israel. Leave this woman alone and stop bringing shame on your school and your state.

If the Thieves of the Balfour Declaration
were sure They will be killed
in the hands of the Arabs
the same way as they are killing the Arabs
when power is turning in favor of Arabs
then, they would’t be committing their crimes

Ali, I like your point about the menace of "family values" (which family? Addams? Borgia? Manson?)

Like Chancellor Wise in Illinois, President McDavis "responds" without saying a single thing about the action of Ms. Marzec--without even accusing it directly of the dreaded "incivility." The fear of litigation is palpable.

It's tempting to think about a parallel non sequitur. So let me just say that I absolutely support President McDavis's right to offer his own opinion in public, so long as he is clear that he is by no means speaking for the whole university. But I should emphasize that I am absolutely opposed to cannibalism and pedophilia, and strongly disagree with those who wish to legalize them. Neither has any place on an American college campus.

zionism is uncivil. ethnic cleansings and genocides are always uncivil.
however, campuses are trying really hard to say that merely talking about this is uncivil because it makes the supporters of the racial superiority-based atrocities so uncomfortable. polite superior races who commit genocides don't talk about it around the dnner table.
very much like family, don't talk about the sexual abuse. perfect analogy.

these events are rapidly converging into an unstable situation where students are not going to put up with it anymore. screw zionism. (how uncivil!) it feels like we are watching a huge earthquake in slow motion.... fascinating. US support for zionism has got to end.